Sesame Street Drag, Disabled Comedians, and More Performance Picks

March 8, 2018 By Cassidy Dawn Graves

Asia Gagnon’s ‘The Kind of Thing You Don’t Talk About’ at SipFest

SipFest
Now through March 14 at Wild Project, various times, various prices

The nature of live theater is that anything can happen at any time. Sometimes this is good, but not always. Spaceman, a high-tech play from Loading Dock Theater about a woman astronaut’s journey to Mars, was supposed to have a run at Wild Project currently, but had to be canceled due to an injury sustained by the lead performer. However, the venue will not be empty. A last-minute festival of original performance works by women and queer artists called Sipfest will run at the Lower East Side venue in its stead. There, you’ll find a solo show digging into how we discuss sexual assault, drag performances, femme ballads, a play inspired by the fanfiction epic My Immortal, and more. More →

Tags: artists space, comedy, crown heights, cryptocurrency, DCTV, drag, friends and lovers, Lower East Side, performance art, theater, tribeca, wild project

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Week in Film: Russian Cosmists and Afro-Futurists From Sun Ra to Now

April 9, 2015 By Nicole Disser

This week, there’s a host of spacey weirdness happening across screens through the city’s cinemas. Maybe it’s the changing of the seasons, maybe the stars are aligned at weird, or perhaps it’s the fact that, as residents of the Northern Hemisphere, we’re statistically overdue for another great comet. While we wait for news of flying fire balls to streak across the sky, we’ll just have to settle for those freaky weirdos turned laser terrorists who’ve been trolling commercial airline pilots for, like, no good reason. Or we can set our sights on these strange galactic, sci-fi, alternate Utopian or Dystopian reality films.

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Tags: Afro-futurism, and Beyond, anthology film archives, artists space, bam, brooklyn academy of music, East Village, sci-fi, spectacle theater, sun ra, The Nest, This is Cosmos, War of the Satellites, Williamsburg

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Nightclubbing | The Raybeats

September 27, 2012 By Emily Armstrong and Pat Ivers

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library. In this edition: the discovery of a lost Philip Glass recording.

(Photo: Gary Reese)

In 1687, Newton’s third law of motion explained that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For punk rock, that reaction was the Artists Space 1978 music festival. With a line-up featuring the Contortions, DNA, Mars, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, it spawned the No Wave scene. The sound was atonal, abrasive and utterly new, combining elements of funk, jazz and just plain noise. As Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group observed, “the edge that originally attracted people to punk rock, that splintered sound, was almost gone by the late ‘70s. No Wave kinda picked up the artistic banner.”

In 1980, the pendulum swung again for four of No Wave’s most influential musicians. Jody Harris, Donny Christensen and George Scott III were veterans of the Contortions and Pat Irwin had performed with George in 8-Eyed Spy with Lydia Lunch. They were done with moody lead singers and wanted to try another way. They formed The Raybeats. More →

Tags: 8-eyed spy, artists space, Arts + Culture, bush tetras, cbgbs, command v, contortions, cynthia sley, danceteria, dna, donny christensen, East Village, george scott iii, jody harris, lenny kaye, mars, musical maze, nightclubbing, no wave, pat irwin, patti smith, philip glass, punk rock, rocko's modern life, spongebob squarepants, sugarhill gang, the raybeats